Essays In Labor Economics And Applied Microeconomics

Author : Alexis Orellana
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (135 download)

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Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Alexis Orellana and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation is a collection of three papers studying topics in economics of education and labor economics. In the first chapter I study how exposure to teachers who are more likely to mis-assess students impacts their outcomes at the end of high school. The second chapter studies the importance of early aspirations for occupational choice and wages. Finally, the third chapter examines differences in teacher quality at the elementary level and their relevance to explain test scores in later grades. Chapter 1, "Teacher Assessment Biases and Achievement Gaps in High School", studies whether mis-assessment by teachers on subjective evaluations matters for students' educational outcomes. I employ administrative data from North Carolina's ninth-grade students between 2007 and 2013 that contains objective and subjective measures of achievement. Using these records, I first show that ninth-grade teachers are more likely to mis-assess girls and minorities. I then examine whether assignment to a teacher with a tendency to mis-assess, estimated from the longitudinal data, impacts end of high school outcomes. Conditioning on estimated measures of test score value-added, I find that exposure to teachers who are more likely to overrate students increases the intention to attend college, GPA scores, and SAT scores for minorities and girls relative to other peers. Chapter 2, "Skills, Aspirations, and Occupations", written jointly with Kegon Tan, studies the role of early occupational aspirations in determining later occupational choices and wage trajectories. Using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we estimate a lifecycle model of college choice and occupation choice to quantify the effect of aspirations on education and wages. We find that aspirations have a sizeable impact on educational attainment and wages, even conditional on latent skills that we recover from the choice model. We also simulate the importance of equating occupational aspirations of low-socioeconomic background individuals to the levels observed for high-socioeconomic background individuals with similar skills. Our findings suggest that aspirations may be a valuable lever for reducing intergenerational inequality. Chapter 3, "Assessing Differences in Short- and Long-Run Teacher Quality", written in collaboration with Joshua Hollinger, studies the relevance of short-term and long-term teacher inputs for elementary students in North Carolina. We refer to short-term teacher quality as the impact on contemporaneous test scores, and long-term teacher quality as the effect of the same teacher on test scores observed two and three years after. Using a value-added framework, we measure how much of the differences in contemporaneous and future test scores can be attributed to teacher effects, school effects, and student background. We use bias-correction methods to account for limited mobility bias and verify the robustness of our estimates. Using our empirical framework, we quantify the importance of these differences to account for the observed test score gaps between disadvantaged students and advantaged students. We find that differences in teacher quality explain 4% of variability in math test scores and 2% in English test scores. We also find that teacher quality accounts for similar proportions when we consider variability in test scores taken in middle school"--Pages vii-viii.